'About a Son' shows often-unseen sides of Kurt Cobain

Viewers can get to know Kurt Cobain through his own casual words

By Michael Corcoran
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Tuesday, February 19, 2008

He was a father, a husband and a son who never really got over his parents' divorce. And yet most people know Kurt Cobain only as a heroin-addicted rock star who took his own life in April 1994, just three years after his band Nirvana raked arena-rock hair bands right back into the strip-mall rock boxes where they belonged. "Kurt Cobain: About a Son," a haunting and haunted film just out on DVD, does the implausible, showing the self-martyred "voice of a generation" as a human being.

More meditation than rockumentary, "About a Son" tells Cobain's story through his own casual words, culled from 25 hours of never-before-released interviews conducted from December 1992 to March 1993 by journalist Michael Azerrad. Those tapes were the basis of Azerrad's definitive "Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana" biography. The film artfully detaches itself from the book by filling the screen not with shots of our southpaw in ripped jeans and lime sweater, but with expressionist images from the three cities in Washington state — Aberdeen, Olympia and Seattle — where Cobain was born, grew up, became a star and died. The film walks where Cobain walked and is seen through his eyes in a few long, serpentine, camera-wobbling shots that trace some of Cobain's routes most taken.

The faces you see in "About a Son," directed by AJ Schnack and filmed gorgeously by Wyatt Troll, are those of ordinary people. But unlike Richard Avedon's landmark "In the American West" portraits, where a white backdrop gave the contrast of dignity to miners, drifters and blank-faced teens, the subjects of "About a Son" are just part of the chain-store landscape. Only the freakishly goofy are interesting, as in Cobain's misanthropic field of vision.

The soundtrack of "About a Son" consists of recordings by Queen, David Bowie, Scratch Acid, Leadbelly, Half-Japanese, Cheap Trick and others who influenced Cobain, but contains not a note of Nirvana.

"Some people were thinking that we couldn't get the rights," says Azerrad, who co-produced the film. "But it was never our intention to use Nirvana's music."

How could this project — a ghostly voice and lots of shots of stacked lumber and folks on the street — possibly be interesting for two hours?

It does lull in places, but this polar opposite of VH1's "Behind the Music" carefully peels away the rock trappings to allow you to know Cobain like you thought you'd never have the chance to.

Azerrad was in no hurry to release the interview tapes he couldn't bear to listen to. He had become close to Cobain, whom he first met in 1992 when Azerrad wrote the Rolling Stone story that showed Cobain on the cover wearing a T-shirt on which he'd scrawled "Corporate magazines still suck."

"I still haven't voluntarily listened to a Nirvana song," Azerrad, 46, says via phone. "It's just too painful."

Azerrad met Schnack when the journalist was a talking head on the director's They Might Be Giants documentary "Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns" (2002). Over dinner one night in New York, Azerrad mentioned his Cobain tapes and an intrigued Schnack went over to Azerrad's apartment to listen. An apprehensive Azerrad was surprised at how happy hearing his friend's voice made him feel after all those years. "It reminded me of why I liked him so much," Azerrad says. He and Cobain bonded for a few reasons. Both were slight in stature and knew the same obscure records. "I think, most of all, Kurt really trusted me because I got him," he says. Azerrad would come over with his tape recorder about midnight every night and the two would talk until the sun came up.

Azerrad says he sometimes had an eerie sense that Cobain might not be of this world for long. The Nirvana frontman talked a bit about killing himself and was in a continuous loop of using and detoxing, getting high and getting clean. Perhaps he was so forthcoming during those graveyard-shift interviews because Cobain wanted, one day, that his true story be told.

Without the Cobain tapes, we might never really have understood the attraction to Courtney Love, who was outspoken, confrontational, drug-addled and looked like Nancy Spungen — all positives to Cobain. "She made me feel like a rebel," Cobain says, describing his Madam Vicarious as "a magnet for excitement." They fought all the time, but also wrote great songs together, Cobain says, backing up speculation that he was the uncredited collaborator on Hole's acclaimed "Live Through This" CD.

A self-described "product of spoiled America," Cobain was a son and a bandmate who never really felt like part of a family.

"Punk rock fit into my low self-esteem," he says of the time when music saved his life. His Aberdeen lilt becomes animated when he recalls when his idea to dress pop songs in Black Sabbath bombast started getting recognition. How incredibly cool it was to be in a band and making enough money to survive. One of the film's warmest — and most telling — anecdotes was when Cobain sat in his car at the edge of town, not wanting to drive out of range of the radio station about to play Nirvana's first single "Love Buzz" (Sub Pop, 1988). His voice is so full of life when he talks about those times. The real excitement came from being on the verge.

"Every time Kurt hit a new plateau, it just didn't work for him," says Azerrad.

Kurt Cobain was the boy who dreamed of being a rock star, yet never wanted to be famous. When he realized, too late, you can't have one without the other, it all just stopped meaning anything. If anyone was just passing through this life, it was Cobain, which makes the words and music he left behind all the more precious.